Black Hawk helicopters and military ambulances waited for hours before finally removing the dead and wounded from around the Hezbollah stronghold that Israeli commanders claimed to have brought under control less than 24 hours earlier.

Hezbollah said that it had killed at least 13 Israeli troops and that its guerrillas had stopped Israel’s efforts to rescue the wounded. “Our men can hear the screams of their wounded calling for help,” an official claimed.

Hezbollah claimed that it ambushed an Israeli unit as it tried to enter the town. An announcer on Hezbollah’s al-Manar television station said: “The bodies of the soldiers remained on the ground amid the destroyed and burning vehicles.”

The four-day battle for Bint Jbeil and the continuing barrage of Hezbollah rockets on northern Israel — with more than 125 yesterday alone — have instilled doubts about the operation. “Has the army failed?” and “No goals attained” were headlines in the Haaretz newspaper, while Amir Rappaport, Ma’ariv’s military analyst, wrote that Israeli generals feared that the war had become bogged down in “Hezbollah-land”.

He said that intelligence indicated that the roads had been mined with bombs that looked like rocks and contained hundreds of kilograms of explosives.

Israeli soldiers have been shocked by the strength of Hezbollah’s resistance, and say that the biggest threat comes from Hezbollah’s anti-tank landmines and missiles.

Major Eran Carasso told The Times: “Since we were there last time I think they have many more anti-tank missiles, many more mines. It seems that in the last six years they have had a lot of training.” So hostile is the terrain that Israeli special forces brought in South American alpacas, from the Andes, to carry rockets and supplies.

Bint Jbeil, which is 4km (2½ miles) north of the Israeli border, is a particularly potent symbol. It was known as the “capital of the resistance” during Israel’s 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon, and is the place where Hezbollah’s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, held a “festival” to celebrate Israel’s ignominious withdrawal in May 2000.

Brigadier General Shuki Shachar, deputy commander of Israel’s northern forces, told The Times that “Bint Jbeil has been done in less than two days. That means every place that the Israel Defence Forces . . . decide to act we have no problem to do so.”

Describing the battle as typical guerrilla warfare against highly motivated fundamentalist fighters and expertly camouflaged fortifications, General Shachar admitted that many weapons stores were too far under ground to be destroyed by air.

“People were building a new house and in the basement instead of putting a billiard table they put Katyusha rockets. And then they don’t understand why from time to time they are hit by Israeli forces.” Israeli commanders claimed to have “almost accomplished all our missions” in the town.

But reports began to trickle out of serious Israeli — and Hezbollah — casualties in one of the first footholds Israel has tried to secure in southern Lebanon after two weeks of air strikes. Yesterday officials confirmed only that there was “very intensive fighting” around the town and that Israeli forces had come under fire from automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and Katyushas.

Israelis claimed to have killed 250 Hezbollah fighters and to have seized a “massive cache” of weapons.

Last night the Israeli military said that it had suffered several more casualties during fighting in the nearby village of Maroun al-Ras.

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